The Queen City shined in the spotlight Sunday as thousands of people welcomed the cast and crew of the movie “Selma” to town and marched on the same bridge that changed history 50 years ago.

The film’s director Ava DuVernay, its producers Oprah Winfrey, Dede Gardner and Jeremy Kleiner, star David Oyelowo, and [rapper] Common and John Legend who together wrote the movie’s powerful song Glory were all in Selma for the historic day….

Of course, celebrities joined King in Selma at the time of the actual march. But they were there to give support to the civil rights movement, not to publicize a film. There’s no doubt that in their own minds, Winfrey and company believe they are honoring King, and not building up momentum for their movie.Selma, in fact, tanked at the box office and did badly compared to the other Oscar “Best Picture” nominees, and Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper is the film that broke the box office weekend record.

Criticisms of the historical inaccuracies of the film, and of director DuVernay’s distortions, continue to grow. On Sunday, Maureen Dowd devoted her column to the issue, and for once got things right. It is a shame, she writes, that young people who learn about Selma from the movie will see the relationship between King and Lyndon Johnson through the director’s lens. “The director’s talent,” she puts it, “makes her distortion of L.B.J. more egregious. Artful falsehood is more dangerous than artless falsehood, because fewer people see through it.”

It is true that LBJ stalwarts, like Joseph Califano, Jr. in his angry ,exaggerated Johnson’s role, seeking to make him the one who pushed for civil rights rather than King and the movement. But if you read the piece by the African-American writer David Lewis in a 2006 article in The New Yorker, where he quotes from the second volume of Taylor Branch’s magisterial three-volume biography of King, you will learn about the real relationship between King and Johnson:

[Branch] briskly relates how Johnson moved from annoyed doubt about Selma to outright collaboration within a matter of weeks. He urged King to expose the worst of voting conditions in Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Louisiana, but he could hardly have had in mind the brutal reaction of Selma’s sheriff, Jim Clark. For King’s purposes, however, Clark and his deputies were ideal—studio-cast thugs guaranteed to provoke national outrage and instigate federal intervention….

[Branch’s book] vividly captures the exact hour when the political order of the Deep South finally invalidated itself in the eyes of mainstream America. The carnage inflicted by municipal and state police at the bridge and along the marchers’ route of retreat accomplished for voting rights what song, prayer, and marching had not.

In essence, the civil rights movement upped the ante and led to a changed America, while in Lyndon Johnson they found a sympathetic Southern politician who might have tactically disagreed with the pace that King demanded, but who approved of his goal. Of course, DuVernay argues that she was making a film, and that she is not a historian or a documentarian. That is a cop-out. On the one hand they push the film as a depiction of the truth; and when they are caught creating stick-figure villains, they reply by saying accuracy isn’t the point. One cannot have it both ways. Or as Dowd writes, “filmmakers love to talk about their artistic license to distort the truth, even as they bank on the authenticity of their films to boost them at awards season.”

And now, yet another distortion in the film has come to light. Last week I wrote about the downgrading of the role of Ralph Abernathy. Now Susannah Heschel, a professor of Jewish studies at Dartmouth College, has publicly written about her father, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, whose key role in support of the march was also erased from history in Selma. She writes:

The religious inspiration that led us to Selma continues, and the photograph of my father marching in the front row there — with King, Ralph Bunche, John Lewis, Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth and Rev. C.T. Vivian — has become iconic. What a pity that my father’s presence is not included in “Selma.” More than a historical error, the film erases one of the central accomplishments of the civil rights movement, its inclusiveness, and one of King’s great joys: his close friendship with my father. The photograph reminds us that religious coalitions can transcend and overcome political conflicts, and it also reminds us that our Jewish prophetic tradition came alive in the civil rights movement. Judaism seemed to be at the very heart of being American.

Not only was King’s friend Rabbi Heschel erased from the film, most people do not realize that King was a defender of Israel and stood in solidarity with the Jewish state against its enemies. King considered himself an ally of American Jews in their common fight for civil rights. As Dumisani Washington writes, “Israel’s enemies refuse to accept the fact that the unparalleled civil rights champion of the 20th century was a staunch, vocal supporter of Israel and loyal friend to the Jewish people.” King had said the following:

Peace for Israel means security, and we must stand with all of our might to protect its right to exist, its territorial integrity. I see Israel, and never mind saying it, as one of the great outposts of democracy in the world, and a marvelous example of what can be done, how desert land almost can be transformed into an oasis of brotherhood and democracy.

All this leads me to end with what is perhaps the most disgraceful celebration of Martin Luther King’s legacy — the decision by two universities to have the ’60s revolutionary Communist Party activist Angela Davis chosen as the speaker to commemorate King’s life and vision. That honor is given her by the Univ.of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the University of California-Santa Cruz.

Davis is a hater of Israel, a defender of terrorist groups that fight Israel, and, as I pointed out in an earlier column, a woman who melded together black nationalism with Marxism-Leninism. She was an unabashed defender of the Soviet Union, a lifelong Stalinist who fought with the Soviet leaders to fight movements of democracy anywhere in the Soviet bloc, and a woman who condemned that period’s dissidents as traitors to socialism. Those associated with her at the time called King “da Lawd” and “Uncle Tom King.” To have someone who opposed King’s politics and tactics honor him today is the height of hypocrisy.

As for Selma, it is perhaps necessary to have new generations learn about the brave people who fought to fulfill America’s democratic promise. The March on Selma as it actually occurred was dramatic and a significant turning point. It did not need Hollywood filmmakers distorting the contributions of LBJ, Ralph Abernathy, Abraham Joshua Heschel and others to the achievement of the Voting Rights Act to honor the bravery of those who risked their lives in nonviolent protest. The truth, on its own, is enough.

The nationwide release of the film Selma, which concentrates on Martin Luther King, Jr. and the 1965 Selma marches for the cause of African-American voting rights in the segregated South, has been received with much fanfare and enthusiastic accolades. It is likely to be short-listed for “Best Picture” from the voters in this year’s Academy Awards.

Questions have been raised, however, about the film’s historical accuracy in its depiction of LBJ’s relationship to Dr. King, and his role in securing the Voting Rights Act, first by Joseph A. Califano Jr., chief advisor for domestic affairs to Johnson, and then by many others.

A major distortion that film critics did not notice was the absence of Ralph Abernathy, who, as King’s chief lieutenant, was always by his side during the marches. King said that he “was the best friend I have in the world”:

Dr. Abernathy and King travelled together, often sharing the same hotel rooms, jail cells, and leisure times with their wives, children, family, and friends. They fought together against segregation and discrimination, helped to establish new legislation, and tried to instill a new sense of pride, dignity, and self-worth in African Americans.

Abernathy suffered bombings, beatings by southern policemen and State Troopers, 44 arrests, and daily death threats against his life and those of his wife and children. His family’s land and automobile were confiscated and he had to re-purchase his automobile at a public auction. Some of his colleagues and some volunteers in the civil rights movement who worked with him were murdered.

Why, then, is Abernathy not shown at King’s side during the marches in Selma? Instead, he has been removed in much the same way they did it in Stalin’s Soviet Union, where photos of purged leaders who stood next to Stalin were erased and encyclopedia entries about them taken out of new editions.

While there are some sightings of Abernathy, his children stress that “the depiction of the role of [our] father is grossly mischaracterized.” Not only were King and Abernathy partners in the creation of the Selma protests, Abernathy, as journalist Jim Galloway writes, was even taken out of the opening scene at the White House, depicted as a one-and-one meeting of King with LBJ, which actually occurred with Abernathy present. In fact, King never went to the White House without Abernathy.

Selma’s director, Ava DuVernay, apparently gave in to the wishes of the King family that Abernathy’s role be diminished. Galloway suggests this took place because of their anger at what Abernathy wrote in his 1989 autobiography, in which he claimed that the night before he was assassinated in 1968, King had spent the night with two women. The film does let viewers know that King was not faithful to his wife, but the King family never forgave Abernathy for what he wrote. Abernathy’s own son has a different suggestion, which is that today people like a simplification of history and only have room for one hero to celebrate, who supposedly alone created the movement he led. King, therefore, was the “only symbol of the movement.”

Charles Krauthammer gets it right. He writes the following about the Cuba deal in his most recent column:

Obama brought back nothing on democratization, a staggering betrayal of Cuba’s human-rights crusaders. No free speech. No free assembly. No independent political parties. No hint of free elections. Not even the kind of 1975 Helsinki Final Act that we got from the Soviets as part of detente, granting structure and review to human-rights promises. These provided us with significant leverage in supporting the dissident movements in Eastern Europe that eventually brought down communist rule.

Indeed, on Tuesday — a short time after the dramatic announcement of a new Cuba policy — Cuban dissidents announced that the Castro regime has arrested leading opposition figures, and prohibited others from leaving their place of residence. They report:

Reinaldo Escobar was arrested when he left the building where he lives in the company of the activist Eliécer Ávila, founder of the group “Somos Más” (We are More). Both were handcuffed and put in a patrol car waiting in front of the building in the Havana neighborhood of Neuvo Vedado. Reinaldo’s daughter, Luz, who was with her father, has not been arrested, but a State Security agency told her, “We are not going to let you leave.” The same official visited Luz Escobar’s home yesterday to warn her not to go near the Plaza of the Revolution today, where the artist Tania Bruguera has scheduled a performance titled “Tatlin’s Whisper #6” for 3:00 in the afternoon, to demand freedom of expression for Cuban’s citizens.

The dissidents referred to the effort of a performance artist, Tania Bruguera, to assemble Cuban citizens in Revolution Square, the area in which the government holds its official rallies, and where for decades Fidel Castro harangued the crowds in the blazing sun during speeches that went on for hours. What Bruguera argued was that having average Cuban citizens come and express their hopes for the future was itself an artistic endeavor. As many people came to the site to participate, the dissidents reported that the police “also arrested …photographer Claudio Fuentes and his companion Eva Baquero. Social networks also inform us of the arrests of Antonio Rodiles, José Díaz Silva, Raúl Borges, Lady in White Lourdes Esquivel, and of the 14ymedio reporter Víctor Ariel González.”

With the foreign press present, including American TV networks, they let the famous Ladies in White demonstrate as they do every Sunday for the freedom of their families’ political prisoners held in Cuban jails. But the police immediately arrested Bruguera, for the audacity of her attempt to embarrass the regime with a public anti-government demonstration. Reinaldo Escobar confirmed that he saw Bruguera in prison “wearing the gray uniform of a convict.” The New York Times reported that the arrests were “the biggest move against the opposition in two weeks since the United States and Cuba announced they would renew diplomatic relations.”

Bruguera said the arrests “would test the climate for change in Cuba under the diplomatic thaw.” Bruguera herself will most probably be released, since she now lives in the United States in Corona, Queens, and regularly goes back to Havana, where she is running a workshop program for immigrants.

President Barack Obama’s sudden and drastic change in U.S. policy towards Cuba has produced approval and disapproval from leaders in both political parties. The divide between Rand Paul and Marco Rubio — both possible competitors for the Republican presidential nomination — is one example. On the Democratic side, the fiercest critic is Sen. Robert Menendez of New Jersey, and a key defender is the current front-runner for the nomination of her party, Hillary Clinton.

Among conservative pundits, the most eloquent defense of the new policy was written by Peggy Noonan, who, in her Wall Street Journal column, argues that Obama’s steps towards normalization of U.S. relations with Cuba were done in the belief that “breaking the status quo” might yield rewards.” She disagrees with Rubio that Obama’s actions give the Castro regime “legitimacy.” As Noonan sees it, everyone knows Cuba’s system is bankrupt and that the small island is a totalitarian state. But, her argument goes, Castro is already a “defeated foe,” and the Castro brothers’ desire for normalization is an admission on their part that “they’ve run out their string.” Acknowledging that they have in no way given up their stodgy ideology, she, like others, believe that once American tourists flood the country, American businesses set up shop, and our technology, business acumen and our money play their part, it “will likely in time have a freeing effect.”

The case she presents is essentially made by all other supporters of the Obama action. The Cold War is over, they proclaim, the Soviet Union no longer exists and therefore Cuba is no longer a threat. Besides, it has been decades since they have used their armed forces and security apparatus to try to foment revolution elsewhere in our hemisphere as well as in Africa. A lot of these arguments are fallacious. Cuba has aligned itself with Iran, North Korea, and China, as well as with groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah. They have recently agreed with Vladimir Putin to allow the Russians to reopen the old Soviet spy base on the island, and they were caught only a few weeks ago trying to smuggle weapons into North Korea by ship.

Noonan writes that increased engagement will make the Cuban government be on its best behavior, not wanting to be embarrassed by oppressing its people as they are now. Moreover, once Cuban army officers find out what salaries people make at the Hilton and other new hotels, they will quickly run from the service and seek jobs in the tourist sector. All very nice, but Noonan seems not to realize that the salaries paid by foreign hotels are paid to the state, and the Cuban regime gives the tourist industry workers a small amount of the salary. Nor does she realize that most of the new hotels and businesses to come to Cuba are also owned by the state, and no foreign chain currently there, like the Spanish Melia Hotels, is allowed to have a majority interest in the properties they built.

Walter Russell Mead points out that what the Castros want now is simply “more Yanqui tourist dollars and a carefully hedged and limited uptick in trade [that] will help stave off the worst” for at least a few years. They seek to buy some time, and not to allow any thorough or meaningful democratization.

They certainly do not want any reform, or to permit democracy advocates to organize, speak, and write freely. That is why the regime’s state security murdered Oswaldo Paya – the organizer of the Varela Project, a petition of thousands demanding free elections — because they obviously feared he was making too much headway.

Michael Walzer, the distinguished political philosopher who writes on topics as varied as the theory of just war and Judaism, is now one of the leading lights of a group of academics called The Third Narrative, which recently issued a statement calling for “personal sanctions” against right-wing Israeli political figures whose views are allegedly so beyond the pale of acceptable discourse about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict that they should be turned into non persons.

For starters, Walzer and his fellow “liberal Zionists” are demanding that the United States and the EU impose visa restrictions and freeze bank accounts for such dangerous Israeli politicians as Economy Minister Naftali Bennett, Housing Minister Uri Ariel, Likud MK Moshe Feiglin and Ze’ev Hever, head of a group called Amana, which oversees Israeli settlements. These four right-wing activists were chosen, a scholar told The Forward, “because they stand out by working to make the occupation permanent and irreversible.”

The group’s members include sociology and journalism professor Todd Gitlin, historian Michael Kazin, sociologist Alan Wolfe and other self-proclaimed center-left academics, some of whom are social-democrats affiliated with the journal Dissent. Most of them are proud members of the “democratic Left.” They also proclaim themselves liberal Zionists who oppose academic boycotts such as those advocated by the BDS movement.

Some years ago, Michael Walzer wrote a penetrating essay titled “Can There Be a Decent Left?” But by signing on to these destructive and hypocritical demands, Walzer himself has provided strong evidence that the left (including even the social-democratic left) has become indecent about Israel. Having taken on those he called the “Blame America First” leftists, Walzer has himself joined the “Blame Israel First” crowd. His group says it distinguishes itself from the BDS extremists who hate Israel. Rather than ostracize all Israeli academics, they stress that they are only targeting individuals whom they see as most responsible for the “occupation.” As they say in their Dec.8th statement, these individuals pursue “unjust, unlawful, and destructive policies in their most extreme and dangerous form.”

Walzer and his colleagues believe that these perfidious individuals do not have the same rights of free speech as the “good Israelis” who favor a two-state solution and the creation of a Palestinian state. Bennett should be virtually criminalized because he favors “creeping annexation, Ariel for advocating a one-state solution, and Feiglin for his “undisguised extremism” and for his advocacy of annexationist policies, such as building homes in outposts considered illegal by the Israeli government.

The new liberal Jewish censors have an entirely different standard for Palestinian leaders. They know that Mahmoud Abbas’ government on the West Bank has demonstrated again and again that it will not acknowledge Israel’s permanent right to exist as a Jewish state, has done nothing to stop the rampant anti-Semitism throughout the school system and the PA itself, and that Abbas has never agreed to give up the “right to return,” which if implemented means the end of the Jewish state.

Since Abbas and his comrades support extreme positions that prevent a peaceful solution of the conflict, Walzer and company should logically be in favor of personal sanctions against these anti-peace extremists in the Palestinian Authority. Unfortunately the liberal, pro-peace Zionists have never protested the destructive, anti-Jewish statements emanating regularly from PA headquarters in Ramallah. Like the BDS movement whom they claim to oppose, their proposals are aimed only at Israeli political leaders they disagree with.

Consider, for example, the logic Todd Gitlin uses in urging academics to follow their lead rather than the BDS movement. Writing in Tablet Magazine and published on The Third Narrative’s website, Gitlin inadvertently reveals that his disagreements with BDS are essentially only tactical. He calls BDS advocates guilty of issuing “apolitical tantrums in cases of right versus right.” But a close reading shows Gitlin guilty himself of very similar tantrums.

Late yesterday, the owner and publisher of TNR, Facebook magnate Chris Hughes, ended the publication as we know it.

Just weeks after their gala 100th birthday bash held in Washington, D.C., at a cost of over $150,000 — attended by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, chaired by Bill Clinton, and with a performance by Wynton Marsalis — Hughes immediately announced an extensive executive change that spelled the magazine’s quick demise.

He fired the prominent literary editor Leon Wieseltier and the magazine’s editor-in-chief, Frank Foer. You can read the details in today’s New York Times, as well as in articles by Jonathan Chait in New York Magazine, Dylan Byers in Politico, and in Lloyd Grove’s revealing column at The Daily Beast. The one place you will not read anything about it is on TNR’s website.

To replace the old guard, who had some continuity with the magazine’s traditions and who had managed to sneak into its increasingly vacuous stories some serious content (such as Robert Kagan’s cover story on the importance of exercising American power in the world), Hughes brought in new management. He announced that the new CEO will be Guy Vidra, who previously worked at Yahoo, and he appointed as editor-in-chief Gabriel Snyder, who was an editor at The Atlantic Wire. Then, he announced that he was cutting TNR’s bi-weekly publication schedule in half, making its print magazine a monthly, and was moving its offices to New York.

When Hughes bought the publication, as the Times story notes, he said he was motivated to purchase it because he had a great interest in “the future of high quality long-form journalism.”

I knew at the time that the result of his takeover would be the magazine’s demise. In a PJ Media column, I wrote: “I am not too optimistic about its future.” At that time, Richard Just was running it; he had just met with Hughes and convinced him to purchase TNR, hoping that he would save the magazine. Shortly thereafter, Hughes fired Just and convinced TNR’s old editor Frank Foer to return as editor-in-chief.

I believed that TNR would become a shill for the Obama administration. This was made clear quite soon. I also believed that the magazine would never publish serious articles that critiqued the ideology and politics of liberalism itself:

So, I am not optimistic about the fate of the new TNR. The last thing we need is a magazine slightly — very slightly — to the right of The Nation. … this is a swan song and sad goodbye to the old TNR. I wish the magazine well, and perhaps I will turn out to be very wrong. But as a natural pessimist, and for good reason, I only expect the worst.

Now, the worst has come to pass. As the Washington Postreported,and was tweeted earlier by Michael Calderone: “More than a dozen senior editors and a longer list of contributing editors quit on Friday following the resignation of editor Franklin Foer and literary editor, Leon Wieseltier.”

The list included its most prominent and serious writers, including its long-time legal affairs editor Jeffrey Rosen; contributing editors Anne Applebaum and Paul Berman; historians Sean Wilentz and Robert Kagan; and senior editors Noam Scheiber, Judith Shulevitz, and Jason Zengerle, among others. The list includes almost every single writer or editor who made TNR what it was.

Why should we care? Despite my own disagreements with TNR’s old-style liberalism, in its heyday — under the editorship of Marty Peretz (whom the editors who stayed on wrote out of the magazine’s history and completely ignored) — TNR had moved back to the fierce Cold War liberalism that became its mainstay. It was anti-Communist, tough on foreign policy, and pro-Israel. It also featured major intellectual articles of a serious nature, often probing ones that cut against the grain. Even under Hughes, some of those working at TNR tried to hold true to its old stance.

The response of the African-American “civil rights” establishment and the American Left to the verdict in Ferguson came quickly and predictably. Al Sharpton and other racial demagogues urged their followers to take to the streets if anything but a first degree murder indictment was handed down for Officer Darren Wilson. The protestors and rioters were prepared, but Missouri’s governor wasn’t. He failed to call out the National Guard on the day the verdict was released.

What is particularly galling is the argument that the events in Ferguson, and the no bill for Wilson, are a throwback to the segregationist era of the 1950s and 1960s, when the modern civil rights movement engaged in non-violent civil disobedience. “The Movement,” as they called it then, showed the nation and the world the immoral actions of police chief Bull Connor of Birmingham, Alabama, and others of similar ilk, thereby exposing the injustice of the system of segregation — a system based on power and violence, preventing black Americans from enjoying the rights and liberties guaranteed to them by the U.S. Constitution.

One of the true heroes of that era was John Lewis, now a member of Congress from Atlanta, Georgia. A former chairman of SNCC (the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee) from 1963 to 1966, Lewis was beaten to a bloody pulp for peacefully participating in a “Freedom Ride,” in which black and white Americans broke the law by refusing to accept segregation on the buses. What prompted Lewis and the Freedom Riders was the belief that their actions would force the federal government to enforce a law ignored by some Southern states that made segregation unconstitutional in interstate bus travel throughout the South.

Lewis’s struggle, and that of the movement of which he was a part, helped change America and made our country live up to its promise. The once segregated South now has more African-American officeholders than there are in the North. Transportation and accommodations are no longer segregated, and the local authorities are not beholden to the Ku Klux Klan or the White Citizens’ Councils of yesteryear.

A few days before the verdict was handed down, Lewis proclaimed that unless Officer Wilson was indicted, a “miscarriage of justice” would occur that would demand nothing less than nation-wide “massive, non-violent” protests. This time, Lewis was arguing to ignore the law, and that only one pre-ordained verdict would be acceptable. Where is the justice in that?

Lewis then compared Ferguson to Selma, Alabama, where, in 1965, marchers led by Lewis and others were turned back as they tried to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge to the state capitol. Lewis said that in Ferguson “the same feeling and climate and environment” exists as existed in segregationist Alabama. In Selma, state troopers turned them back and, when they stopped to pray, beat them with nightsticks; Lewis suffered a fractured skull. Now he says that “we’re going to have the same reaction as people had towards Selma,” which is simply a preposterous analogy. In one case, protestors were demanding their rights as Americans. Today, a jury which included African-Americans examined the evidence and came to the conclusion that there was no reason to indict an innocent cop.

There were more protests throughout the country. At the White House, scores of people gathered outside, where they sang the civil rights movement’s anthem, “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around,” sung in Selma and elsewhere. These protesters, too, were accepting the myth that Selma and Ferguson are one and the same.

This evening, Sunday the 23rd at 7 p.m. East Coast time, the AP posted a dispatch stating that U.S. negotiators have asked Iran to consider an extension of the nuclear talks. Another deadline — this one tomorrow, Nov.24th, which was supposed to be the final one — has been scrapped by the United States. It is clear that at all costs, the Obama administration wants to get any kind of a deal; it has continually backtracked on all the prerequisites that Iran supposedly had to meet and that the US. insisted upon when negotiations began one year ago. The AP story continues:

A senior U.S. official said that with the Monday evening cutoff date a little more than a day away, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry proposed to Iranian Foreign Minister Mohamad Java Zarf that the two sides start discussing post-deadline talks in their latest meeting since Kerry arrived three days ago to add his diplomatic weight to the talks.

Yesterday, Reuters also broke another announcement. The P5+1 — the powers negotiating with Iran over their nuclear program — it reported, “will likely stop short of demanding full disclosure of any secret weapon work by Tehran.” Reporters Fredrik Dahl and Louis Charbonneau write that while the P5+1 powers will try to “press Iran to cease stonewalling a U.N. atomic bomb investigation as part of a wider nuclear accord,” they are willing to give in on what used to be a fundamental demand of the United States as necessary for any accord to be signed. What Iran is now refusing to do is to present to the nations negotiating with them full disclosure of any secret work they are carrying out at hidden facilities, which will enable them to develop a nuclear weapon.

At a Hudson Institute panel held last week, David Albright, a veteran of the IAEA and founder and head of the Institute for Science and International Security, told how verification of Iranian nuclear development cannot succeed without this full disclosure. Referring to Iran’s long history of secret work, Albright stated that “it’s a very big mistake…if you don’t deal with these past questions about Iran’s work on nuclear weapons.”

If you’re going to know the present, and know the risk…[that] if there are undeclared facilities [and] activities, you have to know the history. (my emphasis)

Albright pointed out that an agreement seems to be heading in the direction of throwing “the IAEA under the bus.” If Iran succeeds in weakening the UN’s international atomic inspection forces, he pointed out, it would be difficult to gain verification of what Iran is working on. He also said that unless the IAEA could visit all military sites to examine their actual work, it would stifle any “concrete progress.” He noted that people in Washington were trying to argue that none of this really mattered and expected that somehow they would get solid verification in the future. As he put it, “the IAEA learned that’s a big mistake and a recipe for failure.”

A citizen journalist uncovered Jonathan Gruber claiming that Obamacare passed because of “the stupidity of the American voter,” who did not see through the sleight of hand the administration employed to hide unpalatable elements. The bill, he explained, “was written in a tortured way to make sure the CBO did not score the mandate as taxes.” Soon after, we learned that Gruber had said the exact same thing many times at different venues. He did not — as he tried to claim — simply misspeak on one occasion.

President Obama responded to the public furor, saying at his press conference in Australia:

The fact that some advisor who never worked on our staff expressed an opinion that I completely disagree with in terms of the voters is no reflection on the actual process that was run.

“Some advisor.” The president implied that Gruber was one of many outside consultants, and not the “architect of Obamacare,” as many news stories and commentators were describing him.

[Gruber] was no ordinary advisor — as evidenced by the fact that he was paid nearly $400,00 by the administration for his work. … His advice was important at critical moments when the bill’s survival was in jeopardy.

Tumulty further revealed that Obama himself summoned Gruber to the White House on July 20, 2009, along with Alice Rivlin and David Cutler, to find a way to lower costs. He did this after the CBO concluded that the act would not lower health care costs in the long run. Gruber’s role, Tumulty wrote, “was to explain the effect that a policy choice would have and to add credibility to the entire endeavor.”

Hence that $400,000 payment, a tidy sum for Gruber, who already had made a small fortune providing similar advice to many states.

Then Nancy Pelosi, when asked what she thought of Gruber’s statements, replied:

I don’t know who he is. He didn’t help write our bill.

In saying that, Pelosi confirmed that her view of the American voter is the same as that of Professor Gruber. Within minutes the press found a 2009 C-SPAN video of Pelosi in which she talked about Gruber, and the following, which appeared on her own “Newsroom” blog on Dec. 1, 2009:

FACT: An analysis of the House bill by noted MIT health care economist Jonathan Gruber concludes that the bill would result in lower premiums than under current law for the millions of Americans using the newly-established Health Insurance Exchange – including those who are not receiving affordability credits to help them purchase coverage. (The Health Insurance Exchange is for those without access to affordable employer-sponsored coverage.) As Gruber states: “the premiums that individuals will face in the new exchanges established by this legislation are … considerably lower than what they would face in the non-group insurance market [under current law], due to the market reforms put in place by the House plan, the mandate on individuals to participate regardless of health, and the market economies of new exchanges.”

She then linked to Prof. Gruber’s analysis.

Then we heard the words of then-Senator John Kerry, who at a Senate Finance Committee hearing on October 1, 2009, said:

According to Gruber, who has been our guide on a lot of this, it’s somewhere in the vicinity of an $8 billion cost.

In the post-Cold War era, Democrats have generally been less concerned with America’s national security compared to Republicans. For example, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush brought down the “evil empire” that was the Soviet Union, ignoring the pleas of many liberal Democrats that the U.S. should pursue a policy of working with the USSR, believing that the Soviets were in the process of evolving into a Western-style democracy.

The above stance made many centrist Democrats concerned for the future of their party. So a group of center-right Democrats — foreign policy hawks who did not want to leave national security to the Republicans — formed a new think tank to develop programs that Democratic candidates could turn to for guidance: the Truman National Security Project.

Jason Cain, one of the leaders of its “Veterans Leadership Academy,” described the project as follows:

The Truman National Security Project is serving on the front lines of the battle to retake National Security as a positive platform issue for progressives. … the Truman National Security Project has given progressives the tools and voice we need to lead the country towards a future of both military and diplomatic strength.

The project modeled itself on the spirit of President Harry S. Truman, who — at the dawn of the Cold War — rejected the advice of the far-left wing of the Democrat Party (led by Secretary of Commerce Henry A. Wallace) and implemented a “get-tough” policy towards the Soviets and Joe Stalin’s expansionist aims. (That story of Truman’s new policy is best told in a book by historian Father Wilson Miscamble, From Roosevelt to Truman: Potsdam, Hiroshima and the Cold War.) But today, thanks to the work ofWashington Free Beacon’s Adam Kredo, we have evidence that this once-relevant think tank has completely changed its mission.

They have decided to cede national security concerns to the Republicans, and are re-positioning themselves as mouthpieces for the Obama administration and its policies of “reaching out” to Iran. Kredo writes:

[A] leading Democratic think-tank has been quietly waging a media war on behalf of the Obama administration’s Iran diplomacy since at least the early summer, according to previously undisclosed documents that accuse congressional skeptics of being un-American warmongers.

Instead of standing up against the contemporary appeasers of Iran, the think tank’s leaders have decided to work like a lobby to promote a bad nuclear deal with the Iranians. Indeed, as Kredo writes, they have moved so far in that direction that they now are accusing those in opposition to Obama’s current policy as “unpatriotic.”

It is so bold a shift that the group’s founder, Rachel Kleinfeld, who is no longer associated with the think tank, tweeted this after linking to Kredo’s report:

Embarrassing – & not the organization I used to run. We should do a deal with Iran if its good -not for partisanship.

As Kredo reported in his first post, its communications director, Adam F. West, had told the group in an e-mail:

Our community absolutely must step up and not cede the public narrative to neocon hawks that would send our country to war just to screw the president. … Once again, Truman is gearing up for an all-hands-on-deck effort to support the administration’s goal of securing a nuclear deal between Iran and the P5+1. The core message is the same: a deal is the only way to prevent an Iranian bomb and keep the U.S. out of another war.

Today, Reuters reports that Iran has refused — five times — to let an American bomb expert working for the UN atomic agency into the country to investigate its nuclear activity. Reuters explains:

[This] may reinforce an impression in the West of a continuing reluctance by Tehran to fully answer allegations that it has worked on designing a nuclear-armed missile.

[Iran is not] provid[ing] any explanations that enable the Agency to clarify the outstanding practical measures, stoking concerns that Iranian officials may be counting on Western negotiators to drop the demand that Tehran come clean about the possible military dimensions (PMDs) of its nuclear program.

For all the above reasons, the Obama administration has enlisted its sycophants for defense. And they unfortunately seem to have taken over an institute that was once devoted to bi-partisan measures promoting national security.

This development is more evidence of the collapse of the vital centrist liberalism that once understood the need to fight totalitarianism. Poor Harry Truman is turning over in his grave.